


Last Resorts

by edlothia



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: Angst, Community: avengerkink, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-20
Updated: 2012-05-20
Packaged: 2017-11-05 16:19:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/408468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edlothia/pseuds/edlothia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha isn't a good enough person to sacrifice herself to save others, of that she's certain. But then, she was certain of a lot of things before her world fell apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Resorts

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a challenge over at Avengerkink - "Loki and Natasha get trapped together somewhere that Loki's magic can't get them (or more accurately, him) out of. Cue dark mind games, repeated attempted murder, and serious sexual tension as they try to figure a way out."
> 
> Whilst I couldn't quite get all of those things out of them, I hope the two of them are hot enough to make up for it.

It was inevitable that he’d come back, blazing with ice-fire and the fury of exile. SHIELD had prepared them for it – as much as they could - giving them all a way of dealing with him if he did.

 

Natasha was only moderately surprised when Fury entrusted her with the most important one of all. It would have gone, in a better world – she thought – to Agent Coulson. Of course, that couldn’t happen now. She’d tried to turn it down, but not for the reasons Fury expected.

 

_I’m not a good enough person to take this._

Instead the Director shook his head, told her it was an order – and that meant she had to obey, because Natasha had promised herself long ago that she’d trust him, otherwise the whole thing was futile – and she took the little black box on a chain, hung it around her neck.

 

_Do you realise I’ll never use this?_

Her whole life has been devoted to surviving, and it isn’t going to stop now.

 

\--

 

The first one to fall is Clint, and that’s when it starts to go badly for her, because at no point in her world was _he_ meant to die. All the calm and purpose and training she’s built up dissolves into incandescent fury and Natasha feels herself careening off in a doomed race towards vindication and vendetta. Towards revenge.

 

_Isn’t that what we’re named for, after all? Vengeance isn’t pretty. Doing it for someone else doesn’t make it clean._

 

When the next agent dies she barely feels herself flinch, and the tears get blinked out of her eyes easily when she steps over the third body – she has to live, to survive. Instead she runs into the storm where she can see the ice and lightning battling, see the explosions from Stark’s suit and hear the Hulk roaring from afar.

 

She spots Fury on the rooftop as she sprints past. He’s seen her already. He doesn’t smile at her, just kills the enemy soldier that tries to leap down upon her. The body thuds alongside in time to the beat of her combat boots.

 

_You’ll use it if you have to._

 

His words echo in her head and she leaps into the tornado, throwing her trust behind someone else for once and hoping to all hell that she’s as good a person as he says she is.

 

\--

 

Stark flies her up into the fray, and she clings onto the hot-and-cold metal of his suit. Somehow the blank stare from his helmet makes the danger easier to bear.

 

‘Trust me,’ she says, and glares at him imperiously like she’s daring him not to. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

 

She knows the other failsafes haven’t worked because there’s still a green blur up above them, shooting out bursts of energy into the chaos around, whilst Thor is still fighting, his failsafe forgotten - and that’s exactly what they’d all been afraid of.

 

She knew what the others didn’t. Her failsafe wasn’t just there to save the Avengers from Loki. It was there to save Loki from them. That was the beauty of it. There was only one problem – it wouldn’t quite save all of them.

_I trust you, Natasha._

 

‘Throw me at him,’ she says to Stark, as Fury’s words echo in her head.

 

Stark says something over the radio that sounds suspiciously like ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ and she fixes him with the same stare as before. Knowing better than to answer, he turns her round in his arms and complies. The world around her becomes a whistling of wind as she flies through the air, and she opens her arms to the black and green figure that grows larger in her vision with every second.

 

Natasha collides with Loki and the two of them tumble helplessly through the tornado, her arms and legs coiled tightly around his body. She barely has time to recognise the pain of his teeth, needle-sharp, biting into the soft skin of her neck as she flicks open the box at the end of the chain and blinding white light swallows the two of them whole.

 

\--

 

Fury described it to her, but Natasha never thought it’d be like this.

 

The walls and floor are a pale cream that was probably intended by the creators of the Room to be a little less garish than white. No windows or doors or any possibilities of escape are visible. It’s just her, hair sticking out in every direction from the gales and one gun clutched in her hand, the now empty box in the other.

 

Loki is crouched across the other side of the room – trust him to land on two feet like some sort of cat, whilst she’s sprawled on the floor – and staring at her like she’s some sort of delectable treat. It’s a look she’s seen before, but not from him.

 

‘Where _are_ we?’ he asks, and there’s no anger in his voice – only curiosity.

 

Natasha picks herself up off the floor, but keeps her gun ready in her hand. ‘An interdimensional room,’ she says as nonchalantly as she can manage. ‘To which there is now only one key.’

 

‘Safe in the hands of Director Fury, no doubt?’

 

She smiles thinly. ‘No doubt.’

 

\--

 

Loki paces towards her in effortless strides, and it’s only then that she’s struck by quite how much taller than her he is. He places one palm flat down on the wall behind her almost casually as he leans in.

 

‘Your little room may have cost me my freedom,’ he explains almost politely, whilst his posture claims the space around her with ease. ‘But then, I can’t be the only one here who’s feeling a little hard done by. You must have done something rather terrible to be given this...assignment, little spider.’

 

_I trust you, Natasha._

She doesn’t flinch, but there’s a burning behind her eyes she does her best to attribute to the high winds they were in until a few moments ago. It’s a lie and they both know it.

 

‘Someone had to,’ states Natasha, and she almost believes it.

 

He laughs in her ear and reaches up to run a finger over the burning red mark on her neck where he bit her. There’s an eerily fond look in his eyes as he stares at it, still chuckling lightly moments later.

 

‘You’re expendable too,’ Loki says wistfully, and there’s more meaning in his words than she can quantify.

 

\--

 

Somehow, Natasha expected more. More of what, it was impossible to be certain – pain, perhaps. It was simpler when people tried to hit you, after all – and perhaps that’s where her thinking falls down, because Loki is nothing remotely resembling simple.

 

The world crashes down around her as he speaks, leaning in to splay his free hand against the wall on her other side, towering over her so closely that his breath brushes against the sore skin of her neck.

 

‘Well then,’ Loki whispers, his eyes burning ice into her skin. ‘I suppose it would be remiss of me not to give you the treatment you’re expecting.’

 

Natasha’s body tenses and she bends at the knees in preparation to plant them into his chest – but before she can push off from the wall, Loki’s hands have grasped at her waist and pulled her body flush against his.

 

He smirks, and presses his lips – which aren’t cold like they should be; they lance fire over her skin instead – against the bite mark where she realises now he marked his claim some time ago. Utterly confused, she lets out a perplexed sound and tries to pull away.

 

‘Oh?’ muses Loki aloud, an impish smile twitching at his lips. ‘I’m sorry...were you expecting something else?’

 

\--

 

‘Would you _like_ something else?’

 

She can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t make sense of anything but the way her whole body is lit up in burning fire just from his voice alone.

 

 _I trust you, Natasha_.

 

Natasha’s certain this isn’t what the Director intended, and the smirk on Loki’s lips tells her that she isn’t the only one who realises this.

 

‘Oh, Natasha, my dear little spider. Just because the web we are tangled in belongs to someone else, it doesn’t mean we can’t have a little _fun_.’

 

There’s a trap here – he’s playing her and she knows it, but something inside Natasha snapped a while ago

 

_when Clint’s eyes closed_

and against all the better judgement that fled in that moment, Natasha lifts her arms - drops her gun to the floor - and runs them up Loki’s chest to his neck, winding her fingers into his hair.

 

He laughs, then, and kisses her.

 

\--

 

There are trails of fire on her skin where his hands roam, but it’s the gentle exploration of his lips on hers that make the heat pool between her legs – though before long Loki’s kisses become fierce and full of so much longing that Natasha thinks she might break apart.

 

She drowns in him.

 

Somehow he’s slow and languid and fast and frantic all at once, and Natasha is dragged helplessly along for the ride – though there are moments that she manages to elicit the most guttural of moans from him as she bites down and sucks on his bottom lip, and Natasha clings to them like they are gold dust.

 

She quickly learns that there are things that he can do with his mouth that no one will ever know, because words cannot articulate them.

 

‘Please,’ she begs, when he’s bought her to the brink of orgasm for the third time and refused to let her come, pulling back to lock eyes with hers instead.

 

She hates it, because Natasha does not beg.

 

\--

 

Finally, desperately, she wraps her legs around his waist and pulls him into her.

 

What destroys her more than anything, more than the fact that he bites down on her neck in the same place until she whimpers and more than the pressure of his hands on her skin, is the moment that Loki loses control.

 

The moment when he stops being meticulous, when his movements become frantic and all grip on rhythm is tenuous, driven only by his desire and need for her. It shatters Natasha into a thousand tiny pieces that come crashing back together as she does.

 

Her cries echo around their prison space, and Loki comes gasping into her.

 

She looks into his eyes and sees him for the first time.

 

\--

 

The moment is too brief and swift as he appeared, Loki is gone, standing and gracefully pulling his clothes back on as if nothing of consequence had ever happened.

 

It’s some moments before Natasha trusts herself to stand and follow suit, pulling her clothes back on as if they are an armour that can protect her against the magnitude of what just happened. She pulls the zip up high enough to conceal the ravaged mark on her neck.

 

‘And now,’ Loki says, sitting down on the floor and stretching his long legs out before him, ‘we wait.’

 

Natasha paces back and forth across the room, watching his attempts to break out of the box, and tries not to think about the fact that he waited until after taking what he wanted from her to even think about trying.

 

\--

 

If anyone notices, when they step out of the box some hours later, that they stink of sex and there’s a mark the size of Loki’s mouth on Natasha’s neck, none of them comment. Instead the SHIELD agents clamp restraints down on Loki and drag him away immediately, and Natasha’s left standing there with Fury’s eyes on her.

 

‘I told you,’ states the Director succinctly. ‘You’re good enough for this.’

 

The day’s broken Natasha so many times already that it doesn’t surprise her when she laughs so hard that tears fall from her eyes.

 

When she sleeps that night and for weeks afterwards, she’s always back in their room.


End file.
